Abstract
The process of psychology taking form in and taking on the form of sociotechnological relations is perhaps most observable in the child’s ontogenetic development. The utter dependence of the infant upon a social environment makes early development a microcosm of the social formation of mind. Ontogeny also reveals the relation of psychology to biology, and the individual to society. The clarity with which all of these relationships are manifested in a given individual made developmental psychology the favorite topic of Vygotsky and his colleagues. Comparing periods of a child’s life offered a perfect complement to phylogenetic comparisons of species and historical comparisons of adults.
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Notes
Zinchenko (1984, pp. 70-71) is correct in his criticism that Vygotsky’s emphasis on the formal linguistic mediation of childhood thinking (and psychological development, in general) apart from children’s societal-material intercourse endowed Vygotsky’s system of ideas with a certain intellectualism. In many of his writings, linguistic concepts which formed children’s cognitive structures were suspended in a world of their own apart from concrete society.
Vygotsky and Luria’s contrast between lower and higher processes resembles Whorfs, cited in Chapter 1. Both authors seek to distinguish social-psychological phenomena from natural ones. Although conceptually similar, there is a technical difference. Vygotsky’s lower processes are infantile, reflexive, subcortical phenomena. Whorf’s lower processes are adult, cortically mediated, sensory phenomena which are artificially isolated and deprived of social knowledge. In their own ways, both lower processes are nonsocial and non-mental. They are qualitatively different from higher processes and do not engender them. Wertsch (1985, pp. 47-48) faults Vygotsky for underestimating natural determinants of psychological development; however, Vygotsky had good reason for doing so. It should be emphasized that Vygotsky never disclaimed biological bases of higher psychological functions, he simply argued that the biological base was a general, potentiating substratum rather than a specific determiner of activity. The value of Vygotsky’s distinction between natural-elementary and higher psychological processes is questioned from a different direction by Van der Veer and Ijzendoorn (1985). They deny any biological determination even of infantile behavior, and claim that “even processes generally thought to be ‘natural’ or ‘hereditary’ are influenced by culture” (p. 8). This, however, is quite implausible in the case of early “sensorimotor” reactions which are quite resistant to socialization—as any frustrated parent knows. Consequently, Vygotsky and Luria’s distinction remains a vital one. Unfortunately, Vygotsky occasionally misused the term “lower” processes to mean childhood psychological phenomena such as memory which had not yet reached adult levels of maturity (Wertsch, 1985, pp. 40-48). This use of the term is quite unfortunate because the memory of 4-year-olds has nothing in common with neonatal, reflexive, nonconscious reactions, which is the original meaning of “lower” processes. It is therefore best to use a different term for childhood psychological phenomena and to confine lower processes to infantile reflexes. Vygotsky and Luria also occasionally stated that lower, natural reactions persist until 3–4 years of age, and occasionally even until 7, when children enter school (Luria, 1936, 1963). This is untrue because the neonatal reflexes die out toward the end of the first year, and it is at this point that natural processes give way to culturally mediated higher processes. Although Vygotsky and Luria were wrong about the timing of the transition from lower to higher processes, they were correct in emphasizing the nature of the change.
All doctrines which postulate qualitative continuity between infantile and mature activity are, from Vygotsky’s point of view, erroneous. This includes nativism which postulates a natural continuity in personality, perception, etc., across maturational stages. It also includes behaviorism which construes adult behavior to be the continuation of reinforced infantile responses. In fact, the bypassing of consciousness in favor of immediate S-R associations renders behaviorism a form of naturalism. For Vygotsky, all direct, unmediated associations are natural because they eliminate the human element.
It is important to emphasize that while native men have become more powerful relative to women, they are themselves dominated by foreign authorities and are therefore less powerful relative to their pre-colonial position. “The autonomy of all individuals on Vanatinai, male and female, has declined with pacification and the hegemony of laws, courts, district offices, priests, and mission boards” (Lepowsky, p. 209). The egalitarian social structure gave men more autonomy than the hierarchical structure allows for.
The ontogenetic patterning of contemporary gender-linked personality traits further suggests social construction of these traits. Aggression, for example, follows quite distinctive patterns among boys and girls. Bodily aggression (physical attack) shows a negative correlation of 0.27 in girls from 2 to 5 years of age. However, it maintains a moderate positive correlation of 0.33 in boys over the same age. In contrast, object-related aggression (taking things from other people), maintained a positive correlation in boys and girls, although it was higher among boys (0.51 vs. 0.35, respectively). Both types of aggression are thus far more consistent among boys than girls. In addition, bodily aggression at age 2 and verbal aggression at age 5 correlate 0.47 among boys. However they correlate-.06 in girls (Cummings et al., 1989). The fact that different expressions of aggression are gender-specific suggests social patterning. What else could invert girls’ bodily aggression (making aggressive girls peaceful and peaceful girls aggressive) while maintaining moderate consistency in girls’ object-related aggression? What else can explain a much higher consistency in object-related aggression among boys than among girls? And what else could explain the substantial relation between different forms of aggression (bodily and verbal) in boys and the absence of a relation in girls? And what besides socialization explains the overall reduction in aggressive behavior among boys and girls from 2 to 5 years of age?
While Mead correctly emphasizes cultural determination of the distribution of personality types within a society, her account of the origin of personality traits is questionable. She claims that personality traits are innate and that each culture simply selects certain ones to favor as norms, and deselects others. Culture only selects from among given traits, it does not create personality types (Mead, 1963b, chap. 17). Mead’s conception of origins may be a relatively minor point in view of the heavy responsibility she grants to culture for determining the distribution of personality types and dictating norms. However, in the interest of parsimony and logical consistency, it is incumbent on us to note the error of nativism. It assumes, first of all, that personality is continuous with temperament, which sociohistorical psychology rejects. As we have discussed, culture does not simply reinforce temperamental traits, it constructs personality characteristics. Whatever natural elements may precede this construction are sublated into a qualitatively new social psychological form. Mead’s explanation is inconsistent: People who possess normative personality characteristics do so because they were born with them—they were simply lucky that the culture chose to promote these traits. However, the people who were born with other traits had to suppress these disfavored ones and learn to acquire the normative traits. Mead, then, postulates two different processes, apportioned among different sets of people, for acquiring culturally sanctioned personalities—some people inherit normative characteristics while others learn them. A more parsimonious explanation is that all personality characteristics are culturally constructed and enculturated. Everyone who acquires the normative traits does so through learning cultural demands. Nobody is born with these traits ready made. While temperaments may be innate, these must be transformed through social experience before they become personality characteristics. This social transformation is undergone by everyone, not only by the misfits who lack the natural equipment that the culture demands. Finally, the range of personality types that transcends the favored norm in all societies is not, as Mead proposed, due to certain non-normative traits being irrepressible. It is due to the heterogeneity of culture which includes different demands, statuses, institutions, frustrations, and contradictions. Deviations are as socially derived as the norms are.
Kaye described the parental directing of attention as follows: “By adjusting to the on-off cycles of infant attention, mothers succeed in creating consistent, recurring mini-sequences of events, which the infant in turn responds to and comes to anticipate in consistent ways. Intrinsic processes (the cycles of attention and arousal) provide one level of organization, but adults use that to create a deeper level of organization that is extrinsic, social, and communicating—long before it is understood” (Kaye, 1982, p. 73). “[Thus,] When adults allow their own behavior to be temporally organized by the infant’s, they are really assimilating his cycles of attention and arousal to the adult world’s cycles of speaking and listening, gesturing and observing. So the adults’ adjustment is in fact a form of socialization” (Kaye, 1982, p. 72, 151; cf. also, Newson, 1979; Brazelton & Tronick, 1980; and Cicchetti & Schneider-Rosen’s excellent discussion of social relations and atypical infants). The predominant shaping of infantile reactions by adults is also evident in crying. An infant’s frequency of crying is more a function of adults’ responses than of his own constitutional makeup. According to Ainsworth and Bell (1974, p. 102), “maternal ignoring [of the infant’s cries] increases the likelihood that a baby will cry relatively more frequently from the second quarter onward, whereas the frequency of his crying has no consistent influence on the number of episodes his mother will be likely to ignore.” The authors further document the fact that adults construct a pattern of crying that is not intrinsically given: “There is no stability in infant crying until the very end of the first year, and therefore no support for the view that babies who cry more than others at the end of the first year do so because they are constitutionally irritable. Mothers were found to be substantially more stable in their responsiveness to infant crying than infants in their tendency to cry (p. 100). Early vocalization is also predominantly a function of parental encouragement rather than a spontaneous outpouring. Sigman et al. performed a regression analysis which found that social interaction measures accounted for 22% of the variance of children’s 18-month Bayley verbal scores, while the frequency of toddler vocalization only accounted for 4% of the variance. “Thus, the extent of verbal and social interaction seemed to influence cognitive development regardless of the verbal skill or loquaciousness shown by the 18-month-old” (Sigman et al., 1988, p. 1259).
When parents erroneously construe infantile impulsive acts as true personality and as enduring desire, they prolong infantilism and make self control and social adaptability more difficult to achieve. Genuine autonomy requires volitional, deliberate control over one’s acts which only comes from experiencing social restraint over one’s impulses. Social restraint thus engenders autonomy and individuality, it is not antithetical to them as popular impression believes.
Investigation must deliberately attempt to relate psychological activity to the social context or else the association becomes obscured. For instance, investigation of psychologically disturbed young children reveals that 40% of them improve by age 9. In and of itself, this fact appears to indicate some spontaneous recovery in a minority of children, while the majority are doomed to stagnate in their misery. However, a contextual analysis which compares improvement to family environment leads to an entirely different conclusion. When context was considered, children with early problems who were from stable homes shifted toward improved status in middle childhood in 73% of the cases; improvement in children from chaotic homes was 33% (Radke-Yarrow, 1989, p. 208). The pessimistic conclusion reached when improvement is considered apart from social context is totally reversed when context is considered. The 40% rate of improvement can be nearly doubled given a beneficent environment.
Kagan raises another problem with these experiments. It is the extreme unreliability of measures of infantile attention. The volatility of this phenomenon makes it difficult to accept any correlation with other phenomena. For example, in a recent study by Rose et al. (1988) attention to novel geometric forms at 6 months and at 8 months correlated an abysmal 0.03. How can it be that attention to novel geometric forms only correlated 0.03 with itself over a brief 2-month period, yet correlated 0.37 with IQ some 2 1/2 years later? Rose et al.’s experiment is also undermined by the problem of defective subjects. The subjects’ mean Stanford Binet scores were in the 80s and ranged as low as 59. Sixteen percent of the scores were under 70 and 46% were under 85.
Bruner reports on a longitudinal study in which children were observed in their homes playing a game with their mothers. He found a distinct alteration in the quality of reaching at around seven months of age. Before this age reaching was a reflexive groping at each appearance of the toy, but unrelated to the structure of the game. At 7 months, this random manipulation and grabbing stops. From then on, reaching and grasping increase and they are in tune with the structure of the game, anticipating the time and place in which the toy will appear (Bruner, 1983b, pp. 53-54). Leontiev (1981) provides an additional description of adults’ facilitating children’s purposeful handling of objects by organizing and extending their awareness, self-control, and decaying reflexes: When an adult first tries to give a baby a drink from a cup, the touch of the liquid evokes unconditioned-reflex movements in the child that strictly correspond to the natural conditions of the act of drinking (cupping the hands as a natural water-holder)... The cup is not yet seen here as an object that determines the way of performing the act of drinking. The baby soon learns, however, to drink properly from the cup, i.e., its movements are reorganized so that the cup is now used appropriately to its purpose. Its rim is pressed down onto the lower lip, the baby’s mouth is distended, the tongue takes up a position in which its tip just touches the inner surface of the lower jaw... A quite new functional motor system arises... The forming of this new functional system depends on the objective properties of the object itself, i.e., the cup which differs from a “natural water-holder” not only in being movable, but also in having a thin rim; the baby’s use of these properties, however, is not so much determined by them in themselves, as by the actions of the adult who is giving it a drink, who presents the cup to it properly and gradually tilts it; later when she puts the cup in the baby’s hands, she actively guides and corrects its movements the first time. The adult thus constructs a new functional motor system in the baby, partly directly by adjusting its movements (those of holding the cup to the mouth and gradually tilting it), and partly by evoking ready-made reflexes in the baby that belong, however, to other, natural “reflex assemblies.” A baby’s mastering of such specifically human actions as using a spoon, etc., proceeds in the same way. At first the object put into its hand is drawn into its system of natural movements; it carries a full spoon to its mouth as if it were handling any other ‘non-implemental’ natural object, i.e., without considering, for instance, the need to hold the spoon horizontal. Subsequently, once more through an adult’s direct intervention, the movements of the baby’s hand with the spoon are radically reorganized and are subordinated to the objective logic of using a spoon, (pp. 305-306)
The transformation of primordial sensations into conscious feelings rests upon neuroanatomical changes: subcortical centers which control infantile, automatic “emotional” reactions become subsumed by the cortex which enable social psychological emotions to develop. (Ekman & Oster, 1979, pp. 533, 537). As we shall see in the next chapter, such biological underpinnings are indispensable for social psychological phenomena to emerge although they do not determine that these will develop.
These socialization practices have been investigated in the following research: modeling (Bandura, Grusec, amp; Menlove, 1967; Feinman, 1982; Lewis, 1987), mapping (Laing, 1969), imputing motives to children and treating them as if these motives were genuine (Kaye, 1982; Newson, 1979; Sameroff et al., 1982; Rubin et al., 1974; Rothbart & Macerby, 1966; Condry & Ross, 1985; Will et al.,1976), and scaffolding (Bruner, 1983b). Investigation of socialization techniques is in its infancy because the behavioristic legacy of simplistic conditioning retarded investigating complex, subtle, implicit learning processes.
Margaret Mead (1963, pp. v-xiv) shows how natural, neonatal facts can be used as foci onto which social characteristics are unwittingly projected, despite the fact that these facts do not intrinsically possess such characteristics. One instructive example which epitomizes this widespread fallacy is the Mundugumor (New Guinea) belief that children born with the umbilical cord wound around their necks are natively suited to be artists. This belief leads elders to only encourage these children to paint, while other children are discouraged from artistic endeavors. The result, of course, is that only former individuals become good artists. Children born without strangulating umbilical cords never attain artistic virtuosity. Looking at the bare fact that artistic ability highly correlates with a strangulating umbilical cord lends credence to the nativistic assumption that this condition causes artistic ability. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the presence of a strangulating umbilical cord is a condition upon which artistic talent is premised, the condition is entirely a function of social beliefs. It is these beliefs that make the natural fact into a condition of psychological activity. The fact itself has no such power. In the same way, the bone structure and musculature of the human face is socially construed as beautiful or ugly. Life style and success are highly correlated with the anatomical characteristics that underlie beauty or ugliness. However, these natural facts do not intrinsically determine life-style and success; they only do so through the significance that is bestowed on them by a social belief system. Neonatal processes, hormones, neuroanatomy, sense receptors, and other natural phenomena have equally little determining power on psychology. Attributing causal properties to them is as misguided as Mundugumor projections are. The correlational relationship between psychology and biology is due to social, not natural, causes (cf., Jencks, 1987, for an excellent discussion of this point).
Luria similarly abandoned his early research on social psychology (Luria, 1974, 1976) for the politically safer study of neurophysiology. This, along with his less outspoken, though equally heartfelt, political criticisms saved him from the wrath that was heaped on Vygotsky.
Cross-cultural research has demonstrated that sleeping patterns are heavily socialized. The longest single episode of sleep during a 24-hour period averages around 4 hours for American babies at 1 month of age. Over the next 3 months, there is a sharp increase in maximum sleep episodes, so that at 4 months the American baby averages a maximum sleep of almost 8 hours. In contrast, the rural African baby averages 3 hours of sleep at 1 month and this duration remains stable, with no increase, for at least the first 8 months of life. As Harkness explains: The differences in sleep patterns between American and African babies can be readily explained by the different contexts for this behavior provided by each culture. American parents generally make major modifications in their living quarters and family life to create a separate space for the baby. At night, the baby sleeps in his or her own bed—often in a separate room. Night waking is apt to be inconvenient to parents, especially since it usually involves the complex and highly structured behavior called getting the baby the bottle. Consequently, parents are highly motivated to get the baby to sleep through the night, and this disposition is reinforced by childcare experts. The African babies, on the other hand, are constantly in the company of other people whose activities determine their opportunities for sleep. At night, the baby sleeps in skin-to-skin contact with the mother and may wake up to nurse at will.” (Harkness, 1980, p. 9, emphasis added; Super & Harkness, 1982, p. 14)
Sapir observes how breathing is as socialized as religious doctrines are: There are polite and impolite ways of breathing. There are special attitudes which seem to characterize whole societies that undoubtedly condition the breathing habits of the individuals who make up these societies. Ordinarily the characteristic rhythm of breathing of a given individual is looked upon as a matter for strictly individual definition. But if the emphasis shifts to the consideration of a certain manner of breathing as due to good form or social tradition or some other principle that is usually given a social context, then the whole subject of breathing at once ceases to be a merely individual concern and takes on the appearance of a social pattern. Thus, the regularized breathing of the Hindu Yogi, the subdued breathing of those who are in the presence of a recently deceased companion laid away in a coffin and surrounded by all the ritual of the funeral observances, the style of breathing which one learns from an operatic singer who gives lessons on the proper control of the voice, are capable of isolation as socialized modes of conduct that have a definite place in the history of human culture, though they are obviously not a whit less facts of individual behavior than the most casual and normal style of breathing, such as one rarely imagines to have other than purely individual implications. Strange as it may seem at first blush, there is no hard and fast line of division as to class of behavior between a given style of breathing, provided that it be socially interpreted, and a religious doctrine or a form of political administration.” (Sapir, 1974, pp. 33-34)
Vygotsky’s antipathy to behaviorism is validated by research which thoroughly repudiates this misguided learning theory. Contrary to the S-R caricature that behaviorists endorse, learning actually is an active conscious process which far transcends simple S-R associations. Tolman, Kohler, Harlow, Menzel, and Premack have demonstrated that even animal learning acquires broad, essential information about situations, and is not confined to recording immediate sense experience. On the response side, animals draw upon any aspect of their acquired information in order to improvise novel behaviors during problem solving (Tolman, 1927). The reified fiction that contiguity and reinforcement themselves produce learning is only maintained by methodically obscuring psychological activity, and it is quickly dispelled by methods which reveal the true power of this activity (cf. Asch, 1952, pp. 392-397 for an excellent discussion). Consciousness, not stimulus properties or conditioning laws, ultimately determines psychological responses. For example, Brewer’s (1974) classic paper, “There Is No Convincing Evidence for Operant or Classical Conditioning in Adult Humans,” shows that classical extinction of the galvanic skin response does not require repeated experience with the CS apart from the UCS (shock), but occurs in one trial when subjects believe that shock (the UCS) will not occur after the CS is presented. In contrast, even when the shock electrode was removed from subjects, those who continued to believe that shock would resume manifested the GSR and did not extinguish it (Brewer, p. 8). Other instances of learning which violate conditioning principles are “backward conditioning”—where the CS is encountered after the UCS rather than before, as prescribed in conditioning theory (Brewer, 1974, p. 10)—and humans’ ability to relate events over long temporal periods in contrast to conditioning’s requirements that associations be instant in order to be effectively learned. In addition, “conditioning” only occurs when subjects are aware of an intelligible relationship between events. Even Thorndike discovered that if, during the learning of a task, the subject was suddenly given a monetary reward for some reason not logically connected to his response—showing up for the experiment, for example—the “reward” had little or no effect upon the probability that the preceding response would be repeated upon presentation of the eliciting stimulus. Recent research has further confirmed the importance of intelligibility for learning. Longstreth (1972) has demonstrated that neutral stimuli do not become secondary reinforcers simply as a function of being paired with primary reinforcers; rather they only acquire reinforcing properties if the subject expects them to bring future rewards. Similarly, when the relationship between a CS and UCS is masked, learning does not occur even when the two are presented in accordance with conditioning principles (Brewer, 1974; Dawson, 1973; Dawson & Biferno, 1973). This holds for the acquisition of GRS, heart rate, eye-blink, and verbal learning. Verbal learning and semantic activation do not occur independently of conscious awareness (cf. Holender, 1986, for a critique of semantic activation without conscious awareness). Instead, verbal conditioning is a direct function of the experimenter’s expectancy as to whether it will occur, and subjects who are led to think that the experiment is testing their conformity manifest reduced verbal “conditioning” (Silverman, 1977, pp. 43-55). Operant schedules of reinforcement also only yield predicted response patterns from subjects who are aware of the schedules, and not from unaware subjects. Uninformed subjects placed on a fixed interval schedule manifested variable performance curves consistent with their hypotheses about the reinforcement contingencies (Brewer, 1974, pp. 19-20; Bandura, 1986, p. 129). Comprehension, not mere observation, constitutes learning and it requires an active, transcendent consciousness. For instance, learning the statement “Psychology is social” obviously involves far more than superficially reading and repeating this sense datum of three words (cf. Colaizzi, 1978). In fact, simply reading and repeating this statement would not constitute learning it. Learning this content requires transcending its immediacy, seeing it embodied in a variety of concrete examples, and understanding its ramifications. Meaning is not a discrete phenomenon, laying open on the surface of a few words or events, and available to sense impressions; it inheres in things and must be drawn from them. Acquired knowledge frees man to use it in any manner he finds useful. Learning does not bind man to given stimuli. Just as learning to play the piano gives one the means to play any kind of piece (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, p. 96), so all learning imparts conceptions and rules for generating variant forms of behavior to suit different purposes and circumstances (Bandura, 1986, p. 46). Objective learning thus enhances subjectivity as it depends upon subjectivity. Far from learning obviating subjectivity, subjectivity is inextricably part of learning. In fact, subconscious, instinctual animals are incapable of learning. Behaviorism’s truncated view does not correspond to normal human activity, but rather to pathology where mastery of things is inhibited. Kurt Goldstein’s (1963) description of patients with cortical lesions bears an unmistakable resemblance to stimulus-response accounts of behavior. These patients whose higher cognitive functions have been impaired mechanically respond to external stimuli, sense only disparate elements rather than configured structures, engage in isolated acts rather than purposeful, integrated action patterns, and are “able to take the objects only as they are given in sense experience” (Goldstein, 1963, p. 76). Indeed, “the greater the defect of the organism, the simpler are its responses to stimuli” (p. 37).
Arnold Hauser provides a good example of the social basis of creativity in describing how the artist builds upon what he has learned to create a new product: Just as a child at first only uses the language of his immediate environment, so the artist begins by imitating others, by copying and modifying his prototypes. He develops usually from using a more general to a more individual formal language, follows, that is, a direction which is opposed to the widespread romantic notion of the evolution of an artist: he departs from the general idiom and approaches a personal form of expression instead of taking the opposite course.... Conventionalism is a force of the dialectic of artistic creation: it not only limits spontaneity but also gives it wings. (Hauser, 1982, p. 42, 37)
Speaking of psychological capacity, Isbell and McKee (1980) state, “Human beings universally share the same basic cognitive capacities, but nonetheless, environmental pressures and cultural selection will result in the adaptive development of specific cognitive skills, depending upon the environmental and cultural demands which confront the developing child. One source of the selection of special sets of cognitive skills is found in the culturally determined structure which mediates communication between babies and caretakers” (p. 330). Ogbu (1987, p. 156) similarly states, “The psycho-biological foundation for human development is probably present cross-culturally, as is human malleability. However, what develops depends on cultural requirements, resulting in patterned adaptive cultural outcomes that vary cross-culturally.” Another indication of universal capacity which becomes differentiated under social influence is the fact that cognitive differences associated with socioeconomic class increase with age. Jachuck and Mohanty (1974) found that the difference score between upper-and lower-class 14-16-year-olds on Raven’s progressive Matrices was twice that of 8-10-year-olds. In other words, youngsters are relatively similar in ability and become different under the impact of class social relationships. The same transition from universal, shared competence to differentiated abilities is characteristic of gender-related psychological phenomena. Frieze et al. (1978, pp. 53-78) and Unger (1979, pp. 84ff.) conclude after extensive reviews of the literature that male-female differences in psychological competence are minimal among infants and only become evident in later childhood. For instance, sex differences are weak among infants and small children concerning social responsiveness, smiling, vocalization, dependency, attachment, fearfulness, spatial perception, nurturance, and aggression. Even older children manifest few gender-related psychological differences on ecologically sensitive measures. Such measures must employ test items that are appropriate to the experiences of both sexes. For instance, if aggression is not only defined as physical attack, but includes psychological attack and rejection as well, girls are as aggressive as boys. Qualitative differences in expression of aggression should not obscure overall quantitative commonality. Frieze and Unger conclude that the few gender-related psychological differences which have been established are due to social psychological factors.
We shall demonstrate in the next chapter that the cortical neurones which are involved in higher psychological activity are stimulated in the act of developing that activity. Rather than specialized neurones preceding activity, they are specialized by the activity.
Support for this assertion comes from “idiot savants” who are mentally retarded in most respects, yet manage to excel in certain areas. These areas of excellence are stimulated by circumscribed opportunities within generally unfavorable life conditions. The limited opportunities force the individual to channel his mental functions accordingly. Great prowess is achieved in these areas because they are the sole avenues of stimulation, self-identity, satisfaction, expression, and success. Idiot savants are not possessed with any indigenous superiority; they developed their capability out of necessity. They do so in the same way that physically handicapped individuals compensate by developing other sensory capabilities to unusual heights. The handicapped demonstrate that sensory processes can be advanced by concentration and practice, and idiot savants demonstrate that cognitive capabilities can be advanced through the same means (Howe, 1989). Anybody can develop capabilities with great speed, fluency, and proficiency (i.e., “naturalness”) if conditions warrant.
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Ratner, C. (1991). The Development of Psychology in the Individual. In: Vygotsky’s Sociohistorical Psychology and its Contemporary Applications. Cognition and Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2614-2_5
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